Winter wrapped: The most underheard releases from 2026's early months

As we welcome the encroaching spring season of music on the way, the scene is set to sound a lot more upbeat and sun-kissed, and leaving the greyscale drear of winter behind. But there's a bliss buried within that gloom, too, and the winter 2026 season has produced a vast catalogue of great tunes — too much, in fact, for everyone to get around to. Here's a round-up of some of the season's most underheard releases, each possessing a layered sound perfectly attributed to the soon-bygone blur of the winter haze.

Sassy 009's Dreamer+

Staring out onto a horizon of barren, boundless pale; the grass behind departed with its verdant flavour. On the album cover of her debut Dreamer+, Sassy 009 is caged within the icy, uniquely cheerless confines of the January air. Instead of sinking into the grey, she weaponises this season's dormant power in cultivating a soundscape that belongs firmly within the frosty dark.

Sunniva Lindgård of Sassy 009 sweeps the listener into a cold, sleepwalker's odyssey. She journeys sonically through not just the materiality of winter — the oppressive breeze, the chill in the air — but the intangible. It's an electronic, trip-hop-laced exhibition through the solitudes of a season that can feel like "slipping into another world", far departed from the ideals of feeling the sun grace your skin.

Tracks like 'My Candle' or 'Tell Me' sink us into the ashen haze of Dreamer+, using expert, experimental and layered production to trap the listener far below the ice. Her stunning vocals are morphed into something ominous and robotic, sending a chill down your spine, and features like Blood Orange arrive to form an alloy from the mixture of their vocal styles.

Dreamer+ metamorphoses the inertia of the calendar's fresh start into a device, formulating a rich, icy soundscape that sounds just as extra-terrestrial as it is deeply human. It's certainly one of the year's standouts so far for a hard day's transition into night, or for gazing out onto the twilight, barely able to keep your eyes open. It's utterly hypnotic, entrancing its listeners in the sweeping warmth of something that sounds cosmic and frozen over.

https://open.spotify.com/album/5NtxvFIhVQUjNaGE69y93P?si=cbdWtCioR2SNEYVhbvcXeQ

Blackwater Holylight's Not Here Not Gone

A unique trait of the winter season's output is being able to cultivate a noise so mercurial: a warm hug in one moment, and next a forceful projection into the funereality of having to embrace the cold again. Winter albums often carry something both elegiac and elegant, though, as if braving the blizzards isn't so bad with the beauty of great music to drown out the noise.

In many ways, Blackwater Holylight is the seminal demonstration of that phenomenon; even their name illustrates the concomitant duality of light and dark, of hot and cold. This all-girl American group masterfully bury their audience into the plights of icy doom, yet they also steer their listeners through hypnagogic, droning shoegaze riffs that sonically recreate sinking in blood or magma. Their latest Not Here Not Gone is 46 minutes straight of whiplashing through these dual waves, and never knowing what you'll find yourself feeling next.

The girls craft an aptly named 'Involuntary Haze' that entrances listeners into something of a doom-gaze out-of-body experience: a sound deserving and totally emblematic of a label name like Suicide Squeeze. Each song, every thundering strike of the guitar, carries weight and solemn grandeur, and it's truly striking how they manage to drift through so many subgenres or little ideas while still pertaining to heavy, superordinate and psychedelic dread.

Not Here Not Gone is a top-of-their-game, sudden thrust into a lake of blood and transcendent metal. Even while sinking, you'll inexplicably find a way to shoegaze and assimilate into the purpose of the noise through the endless, spectral passages on 'Bodies', or the yearning, doomed hell of sombre ballad 'Void To Be'. It's the sound of a "many thousands of stabbing swords" in the best way possible, and deeply unappreciated thus far, given its mesmeric quality.

https://open.spotify.com/album/55jaQmtN4s05nDUqqrmXkw?si=ftkJt8y8SB2PsuIfZyM-bw

Ulrika Spacek's EXPO

Last but not least is a fascinating case. Ulrika Spacek are an English art-rock quintet (bizarrely helmed by an army of guys named Rhys) that strictly move in the moonlight. Their trajectories haven't yet found them off in the stratosphere, forced to continue their day jobs as physicists or graphic designers, all the while sneaking into the shadowy after-hours to play shows and hone their sound.

Creating something as impressive, as poly-textured and as amorphous as their latest album EXPO,  all the while working full-time, non-music careers, is astounding. I wait passionately to hear their output someday unburdened by external prospects. It's an exotic art-rock outbreak that deserves to be played loud amid the snow, or projected from a boombox on some distant alien planet.

It's apparent mere moments into the tracklist that, for a group that wishes to be post-genre, their work is a striking homage. The influences of Radiohead or Arcade Fire are felt as much in the vocals as they are seen in the album cover, something that could undeniably be likened to the former's iconography. This transgresses being labelled as derivative, instead landing as a sidekicking expansion on what is simultaneously a bygone era, and something that appeared so far-future. The jagged guitar melodies are cold and metallic as if they're strung with the end of an icepick. Soon after, the hypnotic cries of a synth join the fray, ensuring a sound that never becomes stagnant or frozen.

Ultimately, Ulrika Spacek are just what is needed to fill the void of winter. Their sound isn't a warm hug; it's lonely, foreign, dystopian. But there's a comfort in that — a uniting function of all these albums — as a soundtrack to ameliorate the unanswerable. These albums are a point of sonic solace in the eye of a great storm, or a weary and warped "I understand you" at a particularly atomised time of life, and they've unisonally made winter 2026 brighter.

https://open.spotify.com/album/6LLi2GeMAcPyUvwWxS2Gy7?si=BtQinpgWSuGnKFCNqR2Nkw